


when we were orphans

by diana_hawthorne (stsgirlie)



Category: Cracks (2009)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-02
Updated: 2015-12-02
Packaged: 2018-05-04 13:40:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5336147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stsgirlie/pseuds/diana_hawthorne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>why do you look on us, and shake your head, <br/>and call us wretches, orphans, castaways...?<br/>-william shakespeare</p>
            </blockquote>





	when we were orphans

why do you look on us, and shake your head,   
and call us wretches, orphans, castaways...?  
-william shakespeare

miss g.  
Miss Nievan summons her to her office early one morning and delivers a speech both unpractised and stiff, though she barely notices. She absorbs only a few words, those least familiar to her – cholera, epidemic, hundreds dead. She is made to understood that her parents have died – her father a doctor, her mother a nurse, they were necessarily in the thick of it all. They heavy weight of the written words in her pocket, inscribed by her father so long ago, three months ago, bear witness to that.

She leaves abruptly, hardly waiting for Miss Nievan to utter a dismissal.

At night, every night, she re-reads that last letter from her father, until the folds of the letter give way and the ink fades into nothing.

(She stays here not because it makes her happy, but because she drops one piece of the letter and never manages to find it.

She doesn’t give up looking.)

 

di radfield.  
She finds him in the bath. The door is open – half-open, at least, and she can hear the water running, can see what looked like cochineal staining the water. His mouth dips down at the corners and from now on her lips mimic his.

She remembers very little of him, aside from the long long corridors filled with works of modern art. He once cut an orange in quarters for her, teaching her fractions as the juice stained the palm of his hand.

She finds a tangerine in the toe of her Christmas stocking at school that next year and Poppy has to hold her hair back as she vomits up her Christmas pudding.

(He never wrote to her and she has no pictures of him, though when she looks in the mirror sometimes she can see the pink water of his final bath, and the puddles that formed on the floor.

This is what she remembers.)

 

poppy.  
At her birth she commits three grave sins: one, that she was not born a boy; two, that her birth led to her mother’s death; and three, that she looks too much like her mother to ever be in her father’s sight. So she is sent away to the farthest school he can find, to an island which he will never visit.

She grows up there, knowing very little of her family other than the fact that she is not wanted. She has money in plenty, money to keep her away and independent from her father, but it’s no good here, nor will it help ease the pain of not being wanted.

She wants a family more than anything but instead she receives a strict headmistress, a teacher she worships and fears, and Di, her best friend, who would toss her aside in a moment if Miss G beckoned.

(Nevertheless she learns loyalty; if Di ever needed her, she would be there.

Even after everything.)

 

fuzzie burls.  
Her parents leave her here and they never come back, never ever. They send her letters every week like clockwork, and she reads them aloud to the table. She tells stories of her parents well enough, though she does not have Lily’s dramatic talent.

They stay in Rhodesia because there they can afford the life they always wanted in England – large house, servants... and as diplomats they are among the most important people in Rhodesian society. They pay her school fees from abroad and as the years go on their letters arrive only for Christmas, and sometimes not even then.

Her family at school leaves her too, and when she finally follows them there’s no one left.

(No one who matters, at least.)

 

lily.  
She plays at happy families when she is little, sneaking away from the ubiquitous girls and teachers and staff, hiding by the river (out-of-bounds, but she doesn’t care) and acts out the way her nanny used to tuck her in at night, taking greater care of her doll than any member of her family ever did of her. She used to pretend her nanny was her mother, but after she called her that she was sent away.

She loves Shakespeare, Othello especially, because though his heroines and Desdemona especially can be conceived as weak, she finds hidden strength in their characters. Desdemona knows what she wants – she wants sex, she wants to escape the stifled mores of society, and she does.

Desdemona knows what it’s like not to have a mother, or at least a mother who cares.

(Ophelia, too, but she doesn’t think of her until the end, when she is almost alone at the school, lying back in the river with flowers all around her.

She doesn’t drown, though she wants to.)

 

laurel.  
She has a family, or had one, though they leave her here and move away forever within a week.

“There might be a war, darling, and we’d like to get away.”

She is left here, reading the newspapers every day in hopes that there is, indeed, a war, or something to justify being left here alone.

(There’s not a war, not yet, but it will come. She hopes. She prays.)

 

rosie.  
She cries for her mother at night because she is young, so young – the youngest on the team and one of the youngest at the school. Yes, she is petted by the older girls, treated as a sort of mascot, but it’s not the same, and the older girls’ clumsy attempts at mothering only illustrate what, precisely, she doesn’t have.

(The fact that the older girls themselves also have no mothers never enters her mind.)

 

fiamma coronna.  
She’s seen her mother twice.

Her mother was a maid in her father’s house and they were married when he learned she was expecting Fiamma. But a month later the marriage was annulled and four months after that she was left by the lake in a basket.

(Like Moses, her nurse tells her, with a note pinned to her blanket – returning that which belongs to you.)

But she doesn’t belong to him, nor to her mother, she is her own person and she realises this most clearly when he sends her away, away, away.

(It’s not her fault, though he says it is, and her banishment lasts far longer than she expects – for she is, in the end, banished for life.

Even her bones lie in foreign soil.)


End file.
